Thermal Insulation for Electric Vehicles with Aerogels

According to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the USA), aerogels are among the lightest solid materials known, created by removing the liquid from a gel while preserving its solid structure. They are extremely porous, with nanometre-scale pores that trap air and drastically reduce heat transfer, making them exceptionally effective thermal insulators. Their low density, high surface area, and poor gas-phase heat conduction make them ideal for applications like aerospace and advanced battery systems.

In other words, aerogels are an ultra-light, porous material with extremely low thermal conductivity. These properties make aerogels ideal for applications requiring minimal heat transfer, such as EV battery thermal protection.

If you think of aerogel pads as liquid solutions, the name could be misleading. Despite the name, aerogels are not liquids or gels in the conventional sense. The term comes from their origin: they are created by removing the liquid from a gel (typically via supercritical drying), leaving behind a solid, porous structure that retains the gel’s shape but is composed mostly of air. Therefore, aerogels are solid materials—often dry, brittle, and sponge-like in texture – that contain up to 95-99% air by volume which makes them very lightweight. The name aerogel reflects the material’s origin but doesn’t describe its final physical state.

Due to these material properties, aerogels provide key advantages in battery modules, such as:

• Thermal Insulation: Due to their extremely low thermal conductivity, aerogels are excellent at minimising heat transfer. This helps maintain a stable temperature across the battery pack, improving performance, safety, and lifespan—especially under fast-charging or high-load conditions.
• Compression and Swelling Accommodation: Some constructions of aerogel, like Norseal® TRP720, can absorb mechanical stress and accommodate cell expansion over the battery’s life cycle. This dual functionality allows them to act like a compression pad in quasi-static mode, maintaining structural integrity and contact pressure.
• Thermal Runaway Mitigation: Aerogel pads act as thermal barriers between battery cells. In the event of a thermal runaway—where one cell overheats and risks igniting adjacent cells—the aerogel layer helps delay or prevent heat propagation, giving the system time to respond and potentially avoid a full pack failure.

This unique combination sets battery engineers’ hearts racing, so let’s take a closer look at Saint-Gobain® Norseal TRP720, a new material that is designed to overcome the toughest EV battery challenges. 

As one example of aerogels in EV batteries, Saint-Gobain Norseal TRP720 is an aerogel pad encapsulated within a white PET film. It provides dual functionality for battery cell protection in the module/pack. Under normal operating conditions, its special construction accommodates changes in cell thickness throughout the battery pack’s life, and its low thermal conductivity helps to delay heat propagation to adjacent cells in the event of thermal runaway.

It offers the features of a traditional compression pad in quasi-static mode and mitigates cell-to-cell thermal runaway, providing excellent thermal insulation across a wide range of temperatures and strong resistance to high-temperature flames.

A PET encapsulation can be supplied with or without extended edges, offering additional flexibility in how the aerogel pad integrates into the battery module design. Extended edges help improve sealing and containment by overlapping adjacent surfaces. It can also be used to anchor or laminate the pads into the module structure to improve mechanical stability, and as a barrier layer that isolates them from other components.

Without extended edges, aerogels support a compact fit and tight packaging spaces. They are also easier to stack and align with other components. Reduced material usage and potentially simplified manufacturing processes could improve cost-efficiency.

The specific laminate of Norseal TRP720 combines ideal mechanical properties with outstanding thermal properties to deliver a unique dual-functionality solution for compression and thermal runaway propagation mitigation. Its thermal insulation, flame resistance, and cell-conformability make this material a genuine game-changer for EV battery safety, performance, and more resilient battery packs.

Now that you have a better understanding of aerogels and the benefits they provide in EV battery design, we can look beyond performance: These materials also play a vital role in helping manufacturers meet increasingly stringent global safety regulations. Standards such as UN ECE R100 (Revision 3) require robust protection against thermal propagation in rechargeable energy storage systems, whilst China’s GB38031-2025 mandates that EV batteries must not ignite or explode—even during thermal runaway events.

Aerogel-based solutions are uniquely positioned to help OEMs and battery designers comply with these requirements whilst enabling more compact, efficient and resilient battery architectures.

In this context, aerogel pads are not just passive materials. Speak to your tape expert and find out how they can be active enablers of safer, smarter and more sustainable electric mobility.